A virtual 3D model (or simply “3D model”) is comprised of polygons, such as triangles, which represent the skin of the 3D model. A rasterization engine draws polygons from the 3D model onto a two-dimensional (2D) surface, such as a computer screen. Typical rasterization engines draw the entire frame buffer at once. A more efficient method is to break up the frame buffer into individual subsections (tiles) and to render them individually. Each tile includes one or more polygons or, more typically, a portion of one or more polygons.
To reduce the amount of tiles that each polygon is assigned to, a polygon binning process may be used. A polygon binning process excludes tiles that do not include any polygons or portions thereof prior to rasterization. The binning process also accomplishes some rasterization setup by identifying which polygons are contained by each tile. By doing this, the amount of processing that must be performed by the rasterization engine is reduced.
Like reference numerals in different figures indicate like elements.